That said, my kid was a jerk last night. She wouldn't stop getting into things she wasn't supposed to. She wouldn't be appeased by any food offering or by her bottle, but wanted to practically crawl across my plate when I tried to eat. She refused to go down last night, and when we did finally get her down, she woke up in the middle of the night and stayed up for several hours. Maybe this is my comeuppance for bragging about what a great baby she is and how she sleeps so well.
I'm sure, then, you can understand when I say that I did very little today, out of sheer exhaustion. (The amount of mental clarity needed to even do something as simple as document my dinner in this blog is almost more than I can bear right now, guys. Seriously.) About halfway through the day, it occurred to me that at some point I was going to have to make dinner. So I started to think about the easiest thing I could make that I already had all the stuff to throw together.
I found a recipe on Pinterest a few months ago for this Mexican rice and beans. I've made it enough now that I just know how it goes, so it doesn't require me to look it up anymore which makes it an even faster dinner. I use pinto beans because I tend to buy a two pound bag, make them for a beans-and-cornbread night and freeze the leftovers into servings about the equivalent of a can of beans, give or take. Also, dried beans are so much cheaper. You could probably use black beans or other beans here, though. The flavor isn't as much from the beans as it is from the salsa and spices, so I'm inclined to think it would work with other beans too.
It couldn't be easier than this. You heat up about a quarter of a cup of oil in a pan, add your salsa and let that cook for a bit. I probably used a little more salsa than this recipe calls for, but I didn't have much left in the jar and I wanted to just finish it up. After the salsa has cooked a bit, you add your spices--which are garlic powder, chili powder, paprika, and cumin, a teaspoon of each. Once those spices cook for a bit in the salsa/oil mixture and get fragrant, you add your beans. Then, you throw in your cooked rice, and that's dinner. It's seriously that simple.
I cooked the rice in the Instant Pot because the more that time goes on the more I wonder how I ever cooked rice before I owned the Instant Pot. The rice mode cooked my rice perfectly. I don't know why I ever doubted the rice mode. I never should have. It's just that the brown rice I have been making lately uses a manual setting, so I hadn't had occasion to use the rice mode until tonight. But I can say with confidence that it works wonderfully.
We also just threw together a quick kale salad and had some steamed veggies. It probably took Tony longer to clean up after dinner than it did for me to make it. In that regard, I suppose you could say I was on the right side of the dinner/clean-up trade-off tonight. This was a really good no-fuss dinner, and it reheats really well the next day for lunches, so you know what we're going to be eating tomorrow too. I got two meals out of my twenty minutes of effort. Not bad for a day that I spent as a mom-zombie on the couch in between feeding and changing my tiny terror.
No comments:
Post a Comment